Theres no real reason to buy a Mac that I can see. The one exception might be advanced image/graphics rendering.

As Atlusdark said, wiping and installing Linux might be a good idea. It's easy to use OpenOffice as a replacement for MS Office (Just set the default save filetype to .doc), and web browsing/email is no problem. It's also a look more secure to use a Unix variant, so why pay 1000+ dollars to use one when you can do it for free on existing hardware.

It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votesinsomaniacal.blog.com

Methinks Microsoft offers licensing for classroom use, though any amount is always going to be more amount to pay than installing a 'nix distro. Macs are quite expensive but are otherwise significantly more stable than Windows (well, depending on what you're doing to it). Nice array of software available to it - some of the vector/CAD stuff that can be used on Macs offers a nice bunch of features.

For those who adjust a tad slower, there might need to be some courses on basic nav and the like, but honestly. That argument is old, since GNOME doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out.

Trust me, students not knowing how to navigate a file-system is highly preferable ;D.

I remember back when my school allowed regular old users access to the registry if they went through the file-browser into the Windows folder it was a disaster. At first, only a few of us knew about it, and cheating in Minesweeper games ran rampant. Then some doucebag found out and thought it would be a great idea to go around and start deleting random entries on multiple computers.

I'd be pretty easy just to lock users out of everything but a small area where they can store some files, preferably on a server instead of a local machine.

It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votesinsomaniacal.blog.com

"I personally do not see a need to add them as most students only use these particular labs to do:-Email-MS Word-MS Excel-Facebook"

I agree with most of the replies in this post. There's nothing wrong with Mac, I suppose, but there is something wrong with people who only use Mac for the things listed above, and espouse the idea that Macs are infinitely better than PCs. I've heard my fair share of them.

It would be fun to see what would happen if you put a Linux lab up instead though; install Ubuntu or another distro on a bunch of computers and see what they think. If they still whine that it's not a Mac, then you know they just worship Mac because it's simpler and looks cooler.